Introduction
The purpose of this article is to examine the social and literary context of three selected German translations of the Golestān (The Rose Garden) written by the Persian poet Saʿdi (1258), in order to investigate how translational habitus differ, and how historical, cultural and social environments may have influenced the translations.Footnote 1 Bourdieu defined habitus as “both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgements and the system of classification (principium divisionis) of these practices.”Footnote 2 Habitus is thus seen as a set of “durable, transposable dispositions” that is both structured and structuring, and, as principle, habitus generates and organizes practices, and representations, geared towards practical decision-making.Footnote 3
Among the numerous German editions prepared by different translators, I have selected a direct translation from Persian by the theologian Karl Heinrich GrafFootnote 4 as the first translation to be investigated, since it is the earliest complete German translation of the Golestān. It was published at the end of German Romanticism and during a period of German OrientalismFootnote 5 which formed an essential part of the target culture in which the Golestān was received and for which the German translation was produced. The second translation in this study was completed more than 130 years later by Dieter Bellmanm,Footnote 6 a professor of Arabic and Oriental languages. This is a revised and modernized version of Graf’s translation made during the era of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), one of the first classical works of Persian literature to be published in the GDR. The third translation examined is by Kathleen Göpel,Footnote 7 an indirect translation, also called translation by relay, from an English version prepared by the Afghan Omar Ali-Shah that same year.
In this article I am concerned with the German translations of the Persian classical text, the habitus connected to the translations, and the role played by the translations in the target culture. As Susan Bassnett points out, the study of classical languages, i.e. Greek and Latin, may have declined in recent years, but ancient writers are being read in translation and continue to generate a great deal of interest.Footnote 8 The same goes for classical medieval Persian writers, such as Saʿdi. The influence of Persian poetry on German literature was a matter of interest in the 1880s, as noted e.g. by Paul de LagardeFootnote 9 and Arthur Remy.Footnote 10 It was later studied further by Annemarie Schimmel,Footnote 11 and in recent years by Andrea Polaschegg,Footnote 12 Hamid Tafazoli,Footnote 13 Stefan WeidnerFootnote 14 Faranak HaschemiFootnote 15 and Shafiq Shamel.Footnote 16 I therefore pose and intend to answer the following questions: Who were/are the translators? What was the social and literary context in Germany at the time of the translations? How and to what degree can we say that the context influenced the translators’ habitus and the translations?
Translation Habitus and Sociology in Translation
In order to examine the social and literary context of the three German translations and translators, I will draw on the concepts of the translator’s habitus as developed by Reine Meylaerts, in the context of the general sociology of translation.Footnote 17 Translation habitus and sociology in translation build on Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Beyond, where he discusses various norms in translation. Toury defines norms as
the translation of general values or ideas shared by community … into performance “instructions” appropriate for and applicable to concrete situations. The “instructions” specify what is prescribed and forbidden, as well as what is tolerated and permitted in a certain behavioural dimension.Footnote 18
Norms thus function as “various types of sociocultural limitations on how translators should act, think and translate appropriately in a certain context and for a certain group of persons.”Footnote 19 From a scholarly point of view, norms appear as explanatory hypotheses for actual behavior and its perceptible manifestations. The researcher thus looks back from the end of the process towards all that has caused it to become what it did.Footnote 20 This means that by studying the translations at a micro-level, we will be able to make statements as to whether the translators’ individual background and context might have influenced the translation solutions.
Bourdieu’s concept of field and habitus were introduced into translation studies by Daniel Simeoni. As Meylaerts points out, habitus refers to the subject’s internalized system of social structures in the form of dispositions. Under the influence of social position and individual and collective past, every cultural actor thus develops (and continues to develop) a social identity: a certain representation of the world and of the person’s position therein.Footnote 21
When Simeoni linked the concept of norms to the idea of a specific translation habitus, he started with the generalized, social habitus, which Bourdieu described as a set of dispositions that we all have. Simeoni then claimed that “becoming a translator is a matter of refining a social habitus into a special habitus.”Footnote 22 As Meylaerts points out, the notion of habitus has been criticized for being deterministic, static and one-directional, referring to national societies only.Footnote 23 She therefore suggested integrating the translators’ intercultural habitus into the framework of translation studies. By turning the concept of habitus into an intercultural construct, it should be valid for less homogenous situations, she argues.Footnote 24 Rakefet Sela-Sheffy claims that the notion of the habitus is an inspiring general idea more than a concrete workable hypothesis and sees the deterministic view of human action that habitus may convey as a major weakness.Footnote 25 In accordance with Simeoni, both Meylaerts and Sela-Sheffy underline that habitus is not merely about professional expertise, it also accounts for a whole model of a person. The translators’ habitus is the result of their personalized social and cultural history,Footnote 26 especially since most of the translations in human history seem to have been produced by “non-professional translators.”Footnote 27 In what follows we will therefore study the three translators’ individual backgrounds.
The social habitus implies that “culture imposes certain models of human action … the multiplicity of options is a basic social fact.”Footnote 28 When translators act as they do mainly because they feel it is right to act in a certain way,Footnote 29 it is caused by the special habitus. As Moira Inghilleri points out, according to Bourdieu, individuals act in habitual, conventionalized ways that are to a large extent the product of the incorporation of social structures, structures that are themselves the product of historical struggles and which are therefore subject to change.Footnote 30 The translators as individuals, and the agents around them, are thus in focus in the present article. Additionally, as Meylaerts points out, “translationship amounts to an individuation of collective schemes related to personal history, the collective history of the source culture, the collective history of the target culture, and their intersections.”Footnote 31 Following Meylaerts’ theoretical approach, this would mean that the translations of Graf, Bellmann and Göpel were influenced by these translators’ individual and personal background and by the collective history of Iran/Persia not only at the time of Saʿdi’s completion of Golestān (1258), but also at the time of the translators and the relationship between Iran and Germany at the time the translations were prepared. The collective history of the target culture in Graf’s case is Germany up to Romanticism, while for Bellmann it is prolonged to the time of the GDR and for Göpel until the end of the millennium. The translations happen at the intersection of target culture, the source culture and the translators’ individual background. The examples in the present article are discussed in light of these intersections.
The Persian Source Culture
Iran, in the West earlier called Persia, has a long and proud history of literature and culture. In common usage, classical Persian literature refers to the literary tradition that emerged in the third Islamic century (ninth century AD) simultaneously with the renaissance of the Persian language as a literary medium, as pointed out by Johannes T. P. de Bruijn.Footnote 32 The Muslim Arabs’ defeat of the Sāsānian Empire in 651 (AD) opened a new chapter in a long history of Iran.Footnote 33 Iran’s submission to Islam was a very gradual process, changing the domestic and social life of the people.Footnote 34 Bernard Lewis points out that even though Iran was Islamized, it was not Arabized, and that Iran after an interval of silence, re-emerged as a separate, different and distinctive element within Islam, culturally, politically and religiously, contributing to the new Islamic civilization.Footnote 35 Even though Persia was not Arabized, and poets wrote their works in Persian, Saʿdi used sections with text in Arabic in his Golestān (e.g. chapter 1, story 1).
In the centuries to follow, literature, philosophy and medicine blossomed in the new Persian Muslim society. According to S. H. Nasr, in a sense the scientific activity of this period continued what had begun during the Sāsānian period, but on a much greater scale and with much more universal scope.Footnote 36 There is however no evidence for his claim. We still do not know whether the literary branches in classical Persian poetry, e.g. ghazal and qaside, have any roots in Sāsānian poetry.
As Edward Browne points out, the time of the Mongol conquest and rule (1219–1370) that followed was a period of great cruelty.Footnote 37 Nevertheless, this was also a period when mathematical sciences were practiced and developed in Iran, as Kennedy shows.Footnote 38
With the Mongol invasion of Persia, Saʿdi migrated to Baghdad, the metropolis of the Islamic world at that time.Footnote 39 Despite the Mongol destruction and cruelty, or possibly because of it, in his works Saʿdi deals with humanism and benevolence. His love and compassion have been the focus for several scholars.Footnote 40
In his foreword, Sa’di explains that his Golestān is written to be acceptable to orators (motakallemān) and instructive to secretaries (motarasselān).Footnote 41 In contrast to other authors of Persian classical literature, Saʿdi wrote his Golestān mainly in prose, in the style called “inimitable simplicity” (sahl-e momtaneʿ) in Persian literature,Footnote 42 which made it a popular source for Persian writers in the centuries to come because it was a break from an elaborate literary tradition. The Golestān’s prestige was renewed also during the so-called Bāzgasht, the period of “Literary Return” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 43 Even Persian-speaking writers in the Balkans imitated Saʿdi’s Golestān in style and content, for example Fevzi of Mostar with his Bolbolestān. His ethical-didactic work, including stories and anecdotes written in rhymed prose about Sufism and social motifs in a simple and understandable Persian, was published in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 44 As Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak points out, the “Persian spoken throughout the Iranian plateau for over a millennium, has undergone few changes, remaining essentially at the same stage of morphological evolution.”Footnote 45 Persian classical texts such as Saʿdi’s Golestān are therefore readable and understandable for Persian-speaking readers today. This makes it especially interesting to study the translations of the book. While the Persian text, as such, is still readable and in compliance with today’s use of the Persian language, previous German translations (such as Olearius’) have been modified and modernized by Graf, Bellmann and Göpel to meet with the changing German language standards.
Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–69)
When the German Protestant theologian and Orientalist, Karl Heinrich Graf translated the Golestān in the 1840s, German society was experiencing a new era of industrialization. Within philosophy, literature, science, music, mathematics and storytelling, individuals such as Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Friedrich Gauss and the Brothers Grimm made important contributions, leaving their footprints internationally. Translation activity was substantial during this time, triggered by Goethe’s call for world literature in his talk to Eckermann in 1827, with the intention to extend the German literary canon.Footnote 46 The immense German translation project aimed to offer translated world literature to German readers through newly established bookshops; Nobert Bachleitner calls them Übersetzungsfabriken (translation factories).Footnote 47 Such shared social environments in German cultural history will have regulated the performance carried out by the individual translators, their habitus, and the way they acted, thought and translated.Footnote 48
Annemarie Schimmel points out that new impulses had come to Europe from the Orient, but she seems to disregard the cultural relations between Muslims and other religions in Spain, when she states:
After centuries of blind hate against Islam, the age of Enlightenment contributed to the shaping of a new image of the Orient. French translations of 1001 Nights had inspired countless poets, musicians and painters, who now dreamt about the romantic Eastern World.Footnote 49
The interest in Oriental studies, literature and expressions was so extensive that we can talk about German Orientalism.Footnote 50 Among the important and relevant books published during this period, we find Friedrich Rückert’s Grammatik, Poetik und Rhetorik der Perser (Grammar, Poetics and Rhetoric of the Persians), first published as a translation from Persian in the journal Treasures from the Orient Footnote 51 in 1827, and later reprinted as a book in 1874.Footnote 52 It is considered an essential work about Persian poetry.Footnote 53
What was the relation between Graf and the culture he was acting in? His personal history can tell us something about it. Graf studied theology and Oriental languages at the University of Strasburg. There he became acquainted with Eduard W. E. Reuss (1804–91), who had a profound influence on him, first as his teacher of theology and Oriental languages, and later as a close friend with whom he maintained an extensive correspondence. In the correspondence with his teacher and friend Reuss, published by K. Budde in 1904, Graf wrote about his translation of the Golestān,Footnote 54 as well as his career and his health problems.Footnote 55 In his letters, Graf described how he read Saʿdi’s Golestān in Fleischer’s Persian classes at the University of Leipzig in 1844, but had to take additional lessons as this was challenging for him.Footnote 56 In that way he became acquainted with Sururi’s Arabic commentaries on the book, which laid the basis for his own future translation of the Golestān,Footnote 57 and thus his translation habitus. Graf spent most of his spare time on the translation of Golestān,Footnote 58 and Reuss is one of the two persons to whom he dedicated his Rosengarten.
Graf’s interest in Islam and Oriental languages arose from his urge to achieve a better understanding of the religious history of the Semitic peoples.Footnote 59 According to Suzanne Marchand, the common motivation for theologians in the nineteenth century to study and learn Oriental languages was their interest in the land and peoples of the Old Testament.Footnote 60 Graf studied Arabic, Hebrew and Persian; in addition, he knew several central European languages, since his first dissertation was written in French and the second in Latin.Footnote 61 In his foreword to Der Rosengarten, Graf refers to Malcolm’s Sketches of Persia, written in English. Finally, as a theologian studying the Bible, he must also have known Greek.
The aforementioned Friedrich Rückert was another translator of Persian literature in Graf’s time. Among his works are poems adapted from the work of Jalāl al-Dīn Rumī. His Östliche Rosen (Roses of the Orient) are poems and adaptations inspired by Hafez. He also translated some of Ferdowsi’s Shāhnāmeh (1890), Saʿdi’s Bustān (1882) in full, and parts of the Golestān (1894–96), in addition to works by Jāmi and Nezāmi.Footnote 62 His translation of the Golestān was published after his death, in parts from 1894 to 1896, under the title of Verses from Golestān in the journal Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte some thirty years after Graf’s. As Haschemi points out, Rückert was fascinated by the combination of the work’s “aesthetics and ethics-didactics,” but he disliked the combination of prose and poetry, as it gave him the impression of superficiality and a lack of severity.Footnote 63 Annemarie Schimmel in 1988 presented selections of Rückert’s work in two volumes; work which she sees as having been widely underestimated. According to her, with his translations, Rückert has donated a treasure to the Germans, something no other language has.Footnote 64 Though Graf does not refer to Rückert’s translation from Persian, in his foreword he mentions Rückert’s translation of Hariri from Arabic as a more professional way of translating than Olearius’ German translation of the Golestān.Footnote 65 Furthermore, in his letters to Reuss, he describes himself as a Rückert en miniature.Footnote 66 Rückert’s work must therefore have regulated Graf’s performance and his translation habitus.
Among Graf’s publications, we find theological works about the Old Testament, such as Der Segen Mose’s (1857), Der Prophet Jeremia erklärt (1862) and Die geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments (1866). Graf was thus not only a translator; he was primarily a teacher, scholar and writer, who became a translator because he was multilingual. We could even call Graf a “non-professional” translator, since he had no formal education as a translator. In his foreword, Graf comments on his strategies when translating the Golestān.Footnote 67 He compares his choices with those of earlier translators such as Olearius when it comes to the lover’s gender in chapter 5, and also in leaving out an “improper” story in Chapter 2. He also relates the translation theories presented by Schleiermacher and Goethe to his own.Footnote 68 Among his choices at the micro-level, he discusses his use of the German word Werkheiliger, occurring especially in chapter 2, when he refers to the Persian ‘ābed and zāhed which he found problematic.Footnote 69 At the macro-level, Graf explains that he has chosen to preserve the rhyme in his German translations, but not necessarily Saʿdi’s Persian rhythm, as that might tire his readers.Footnote 70
Though Graf lived in a small place, and did not have an academic position, he was part of the extensive translation activity in Germany which Bachleitner called Übersetzungsfabriken.Footnote 71 Together with Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Graf established Morgenländische Gesellschaft, the oldest German Oriental Society, in Leipzig in 1845. At the first meeting of the German Oriental Society, the readings of his draft translation of Golestān drew applause.Footnote 72 Graf’s translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān was published by F. A. Brockhaus in 1846. On the occasion of its 100th anniversary (1905), a history of the publishing house was written, listing Graf’s German translation (Der Rosengarten) among the “Selected Library of Classics from Abroad” (Ausgewälthe Bibliothek der Classiker des Auslandes).Footnote 73 Other books in this series included translations from Swedish, French, Italian and Spanish. After having translated the Golestān into German in 1846, Graf went on to translate Saʿdi’s first book, Bustān (1850). He also published a Persian edition of the Bustān with Persian commentaries, in Vienna and Leipzig in 1858, with a French title.Footnote 74 The French title suggests that the book was aimed at an international readership.
Before Graf’s translation one could find entries about Saʿdi and elements from his Golestān in several German dictionaries and encyclopedias. For example, in Damen Conversations Lexikon (1834–38), which addresses educated women from the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century, Saʿdi is presented as “the most exquisite Persian lyrical and didactic poet” and his Golestān as “his most beautiful poem with a profound moral tendency, where the pleasance of the nightingale’s song and the balsamic fragrance of roses is intertwined, creating a magic idyll.”Footnote 75 The Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon had an entry on Sadi (Musladin).Footnote 76 After Graf’s translation, Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon included entries on Saʿdi/Saadi and on wandernde Mönche der Muhammedaner (wandering Muslim monks).Footnote 77 Even more interesting was the appearance of expressions and sayings from the Golestān in the German dictionary of proverbs, such as Grossmüthiger (generous), Wolf (wolf), Holz (wood), Ehre (honor), König (king) and Fehler (mistake).Footnote 78 This suggests that Saʿdi’s Golestān was an important source of wisdom in 19th century German society, thanks to the work of German translators in general and Graf in particular.
On the level of special habitus, we can observe that Graf in his notes gives his readers additional information and literary references regarding ideas and values that are important in Persian society. His alphabetical list of the issues contains: Freigebigkeit (generosity), Freundschaft (friendship), Genügsamkeit (modesty/contentment), Gerechtigkeit (justice), Stillschweigen (silence), Sündhaftigkeit (sinfulness), Ungerechtigkeit (injustice), Scheinheiligkeit (hypocrisy) and Vergänglichkeit der Welt (evanescence of the world).Footnote 79 Several of these issues are connected to the concept of ʿadab, i.e. ideas and values showing how to behave in Iranian society.
Dieter Bellmann (1934–97)
When Germany was divided into two separate countries after the Second World War (1939–45), literature became strictly regulated in the German Democratic Republic in the East. During this time, Dieter Bellmann lived and worked in academia in East Germany, and revised Graf’s Golestān translation, published at Kiepenheuer (in 1982). The publication of translated literature from other countries and languages was subject to approval by the GDR authorities before publication. Most of the documentation is openly accessible in German federal archives (Bundesarchiv) since the reunification. The archives that I have accessed show that the printing permission was given after a detailed evaluation. In Schreiner's letter of recommendation, enclosed in the letter of approval from the GDR authorities, it was pointed out that Islam had been realized.Footnote 80 This must have been a reference to the Islamic Revolution in Iran that took place the previous year. This event, as well as the closeness between the Tudeh party and the GDR, are likely to have been motivating factors for Bellmann to work on Graf’s translation.
Islam’s function in society was obviously an important issue for Bellmann in the 1970s, since he published several articles on it.Footnote 81 This interest is also manifest in much of the paratext of his translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān.Footnote 82 Social habitus forced writers and artists to produce important works of socialistic art closely relevant to the working class in their own country, as well as to the peoples of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.Footnote 83 The engagement for socialism and the battle against imperialism, its ideology and apologists, belonged to the very nature of this art, GDR authorities proclaimed.Footnote 84 Fritz Raddatz, located in West-Germany, points out that the problem of building up the new German state was not only about establishing a new way of thinking but also concerned the way writers and artists lived their lives.Footnote 85 Raddatz quotes from the speech Walter Ulbricht gave at the first Bitterfeld conferenceFootnote 86 in 1959, and which he repeated prior to the sixth congress of writers in May 1969:
Dear friends, if you want to master the new problems of the socialist national culture, you have to change your way of living, you have to enter into close contact with the people, you have to experience for yourself how the people establish socialism! Only then will you be able to give shape to these new problems in a literary and artistic way.Footnote 87
Bellmann’s list of publications during the time of the GDR shows his familiarity with the subjects of revolutionary heroes, anti-imperialist struggles and liberation movements. “The engagement for socialism and the battle against imperialism, its ideology and apologists”Footnote 88 was part of the social and political structures of Bellmann’s time. Living in the GDR, Bellmann would have had access to the Russian translations of the Golestān, by Aliev (1957). Lambro’s Russian translation was published the same year as Bellmann’s (Reference Bellmann and Bellmann1982), and the two translators may have been in contact. It is possible that other pieces of Persian literature in Russian translation influenced him. We cannot know whether he had access to other recent European translations of the Golestān, as he lived in the strictly regulated GDR where books from other countries seldom found their way to readers. Another aspect of Bellmann’s personal, social and cultural history is his publication in Russian in Istorija i ekonomika stran arabskovo vostoka i severnoj Afriki in Moscow (in 1975),Footnote 89 as a contribution of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.Footnote 90 This is an example of the close connection between the GDR and the Soviet Union: Russian was in fact obligatory in schools and universities in the GDR at that time.
My investigation of the archives revealed that at the same time as the Kiepenheuer publishing house was granted permission to publish Bellmann’s revision of Graf’s translation, several other literary works from both Eastern and Western Europe, as well as the USA, India and China were also given permission. Among these are Hans Christian Andersen, Honoré de Balzac, Karel Capek, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Paul Sartre and Arno Schmidt. My archival research has revealed that Bellmann’s revised edition was also sold to the Schünemann publishing house in 1982, making it available in West Germany.
According to the catalogue of professors at the University of Leipzig, Bellmann studied classical philology, Oriental studies, Islamic studies and “newer Islamic languages” (i.e. Arabic, Persian and Turkish) at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg and in Leipzig from 1953 to 1958 and became a certified orientalist (Diplom-Orientalist).Footnote 91 After that, he worked as a freelancer on Persian literature, publishing his first translation from Persian, a selection of Omar Khayyam’s Rubāʿiyyāt (Zelte der Weisheit) in 1958. He also broadcast in the Arabic section of Radio Berlin International for a year, before he became politically engaged in the Liga für Völkerfreundschaft der DDR from 1965 to 1970 and became deputy director of the Kulturzentrum der DDR in Damascus, Syria, which means that he must have obtained permission to travel abroad, at least to an ally of the Soviet Union. During that time, Bellmann defended his doctoral thesis “Das Anstandsbuch des Ibn al-Waššā (Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte Bagdads im 3./9. Jh.)” in 1966. From 1970 to 1978 he was academic senior assistant and lecturer in the Section of African and Middle Eastern Studies (Afrika- und Nahostwissenschaften, ANW) at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig. In 1978 he became a lecturer in Arabic literature and was later promoted to professor of Arabic culture (1986‒92) and professor of Arabic and Oriental languages (1993‒97) at the same university. His merits were obviously noticed by the GDR authorities, as Bellmann received two honors in the 1960s: Verdienstorden der VAR (1965) and a silver Ehrennadel der Liga für Völkerfreundschaft (1967).
Bellmann was able to present his research in Western Europe, in Paris, in the 1970s. This probably happened because of his loyalty to the GDR and as a way of officially demonstrating the GDR’s contribution to international research. His paper about the Arab cultural heritage from the viewpoint of idealistic Arab cultural theoriesFootnote 92 was published as part of the GDR’s contribution at 29th Congress of International Orientalists in Paris in 1973.
During the GDR period, the Iranian Marxist party, Tudeh, had its office in East Germany, with connections to the communist party of the country.Footnote 93 One of the Tudeh party’s active members, the Iranian leftist writer and novelist Bozorg Alavi, lived in East Berlin. His works were banned in Iran from 1953 to 1979.Footnote 94 Together with Heinrich F. J. Junker, he edited the comprehensive Persian‒German dictionary, first published in 1965 and with several reprints up to 2002. It is most likely that Bellmann knew him, and that he was in contact with him during the revision of Graf’s translation, given that Alavi was a visiting professor of Persian language and literature at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and that he also was a translator from Persian into German.
Though the last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fought against socialism and communism inside his own country, there were formal connections between East Germany and Iran in the 1970s. Oliver Bast explains the bilateral connection between East Germany and Iran as a way of exercising pressure on the West.Footnote 95 In the 1980s, before the demise of the German Democratic Republic, Bellmann published an article about Arab culture in the present time,Footnote 96 and one about women and love stories from the Arab Middle Ages.Footnote 97 With the collapse of the GDR, the social structures changed, and made it possible for Bellmann to expand his research focus to include Europe outside the “iron curtain.” He wrote about mysticism and Sufism in Hafez’s reception in Europe, Mystik oder Sufismus? Bemerkungen zu einem Problem der Hafis—Rezeption in Europa (1990).
In his afterword, Bellmann states that his revised and extended edition of Graf’s translation builds on the Persian editions by Sémelet (Paris 1834), Johnson (London 1863), Platts (London 1871) and Aliev/Alijew (Moscow 1959).Footnote 98 Three of these Persian editions were published after Graf’s edition, and were thus not accessible to Graf. Bellmann does not inform his readers explicitly about his own translation strategy, on the micro- or macro-level. In in an afterword to the third edition of his revised Graf translation (1998), published after German reunification—and after Bellmann’s death—he explains that the changes were made due to “new scientific knowledge” and “modern literary standards”,Footnote 99 without commenting further on these. Moreover, he states that numerous shorter and longer passages, which had to be omitted because of the prevailing social ethics of Graf’s time, have been translated and included in his edition, without going into detail about which these are. Some examples showing changes are discussed by Faranak HaschemiFootnote 100 and examples of omissions are discussed by Zandjani.Footnote 101 Bellmann’s above statements about his inclusion of the stories and passages which Graf had left out are not included in his 1982 edition from the GDR period, even though the missing texts (e.g. about puberty and passing wind) are included. This could imply that the GDR authorities would not have approved of statements showing that rude or immoral passages were included in Bellmann’s revised German translation of Golestān, but we cannot know that for sure. Schreiner’s evaluation of Bellmann’s work for the GDR found in the archives (Das Bundesarchive), inform us of the social structures and cultural actors behind censorship in the GDR. Such structures interact with the individual experience of the translator and develop the translator’s social identity.Footnote 102 They thus could be seen as a constraint on Bellmann’s development and shaping of his translation habitus.
Kathleen Göpel (1950–)Footnote 103
Among the factors shaping the German culture at the time that Kathleen Göpel completed her indirect translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān from English (1997) are the rapid changes known as Die Wende (The turnaround). Die Wende refers to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and German reunification in 1990. With the fall of the wall between East and West Germany, large numbers of people migrated from East to West.Footnote 104 Prior to this, another major migration had occurred in West Germany, when labor was needed to rebuild the country after the end of the Second World War. Migrants from Turkey and southern parts of Europe had entered West Germany as Gastarbeiter (guest workers). West Germany experienced a “Wirtschaftswunder” and became a leading industrial nation in Europe by the 1980s. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and following the Iran‒Iraq war (1980–88), large numbers of Iranians entered Germany in the 1980s. By the end of 1998, more than 110,000 immigrants from Iran were living in Germany. These major migrations caused extensive changes in German society, including the literature.Footnote 105 Some of the migrants, who had left their homes and started a new life in the West in a setting that in most cases was initially strange to them, have contributed to new kinds of writing. Today, literature written by authors who are shaped by the view of at least two cultural areas is called intercultural literature, multicultural literature, migration literatureFootnote 106 or bridge literature.Footnote 107
Among the immigrants from Iran and their families we today find examples of writers who have gained a name and reputation in Germany, such as Navid Kermani and SAID (pen name). These writers who deal with German society from an outsider’s perspective are now beyond the category of “migration literature” and may be regarded as German writers.Footnote 108 They can be considered bridge-builders between cultures, which is also Göpel’s intention.Footnote 109 Migration not only created new literature, but also new groups of readers who were no longer ethnically German. Göpel, with her translation of the Golestān, addresses these new groups of readers, as well as other German readers interested in the culture of the immigrants. Göpel runs her own publishing house and bookshop called Peacock, a popular motif in Persian designs and literature, and her books are distributed at Iranian cultural events. Her target groups underline her interest in cultural understanding and bridge building. In contrast to Graf and Bellmann, the information I have about Göpel is based on interviews she has given, presentations on the publisher’s website, my email correspondence with her, and a meeting we had in January 2017.
Upon the publication of her book, Tiere des Himmels—Weisheitsgeschichten aus dem Orient (Animals of Heaven—Stories of Wisdom from the Orient), Göpel stated that she read German studies, Psychology, Turkish and Islamic studies at the Free University of Berlin in the early 1970s and that she thereafter traveled to Turkey and continued with Koranic studies and Islamic philosophy in Konya and Istanbul. This brought her closer to the realities of the Islamic cultural sphere.Footnote 110 In Turkey she then began collecting stories, which led to her first volume of traditional Turkish parables, Göpel explains. What do we know about her habitus as a translator? In January 2017, I sent Göpel some questions about her translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān and followed these up when we met in Berlin shortly after. She explained that the motivation for translating Saʿdi’s Golestān came as a natural continuation after having translated Omar Khayyam’s Robāiyyāt. For both her Golestān and her Robāiyyāt, Göpel used Omar Ali-Shah’s English translation as the source text. Both books were published by Göpel’s publishing house. When I asked whether she could read Persian or had depended entirely Omar Ali-Shah’s English translation, Göpel answered that the translation had been prepared from the English, but in order to avoid the problems of indirect translation, Omar Ali-Shah, who could understand German, did an extensive and detailed review of the text. This was done in close cooperation with the publishing house.Footnote 111 Concerning her translation strategy—given that she is both the translator and publisher—Göpel claimed:
Islamic studies at German universities prefer our translations because they keep as close to the [source] text as the understanding in a European cultural area would permit. In favour of highest possible text authenticity, we have refrained from any metre or any kind of (free) adaption.Footnote 112
In addition to the above statement about translation at the micro-level, Göpel in an interview with Muslim-Markt, published on the publisher’s website, claimed that though the Persian classics have been available in numerous translations in Germany, they were read and studied mostly by a small circle of experts. Thus, she argued, the wider public knew hardly anything about these sublime works of poetry, the content of which was based on profound wisdom and immense insight into human nature, without losing any of its actuality, validity or fascination over the centuries. This statement about the unsuitability of these earlier translations at the macro-level suggests that Göpel either was not aware of Bellmann’s revised edition of Graf’s translation or considered it suitable only for a “small circle of experts.” The 1982 edition was, as mentioned above, available also in West Germany through Schünemann publishing house, while Bellmann’s third edition (1998), published by Beck Verlag in Munich, was available one year after Göpel’s translation.
In addition to Khayyam’s Robāiyyāt and the Golestān, Göpel has translated a couple of other books from Omar Ali-Shah’s English version: Die Sufi-Tradition im Westen and Sufismus als Therapie. Further, she translated stories written by Omar Ali-Shah’s sister Amina Shah, Geheimnisse der vier Derwische (2010). All of these bear witness to her continued interest in Sufism and Muslim mysticism. Under the influence of her social position and her collective past, Göpel develops (and continues to develop) a social identity: her representation of the world and her position in it.Footnote 113 In her role as bridge-builder Göpel has close connections to the Hafis Institute, which is closely linked to the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Berlin. The aim of the institute is cultural exchange between people in Germany and Iran. On its website, there is a picture of her posing with the members of the board, though she is not named.Footnote 114 As a publisher she also seeks to collaborate with Middle Eastern presses: she has chosen to print the third edition (2008) of her translation of Saʿdi’s Golestān in Damascus and the fourth (2013) in Tehran.
Discussion
The above insights into Graf’s, Bellmann’s and Göpel’s social and cultural background, in both institutional and discursive terms, help us to understand their positions, as well as the possible effect of dynamic constraints, and the evolution of their translational choices at the micro-structural and macro-structural levels.Footnote 115 In the following, I will analyze some salient passages in the target texts, i.e. where the three translations evidently vary, in order to investigate how and whether these differences could have been affected by the translators’ habitus, and their social and literary contexts. Words and expressions in the Persian source textFootnote 116 and in the three German translations in the examples discussed are highlighted in order to illustrate the changes that may have been motivated by the translators’ social and literary contexts. Rehatsek’s English translation is provided for non-Persian and non-German readers and is not part of the analysis.
In the first example, found in the Introduction of Golestān, Saʿdi is meditating on the time which has elapsed, repenting of the life he has squandered. In rhymed prose he states that he was “firmly determined and intent on spending the rest of his life in continual devotion and silence,”Footnote 117 before he finally decided to compose the book.
Saʿdi: 
ke folān ʿazm karde ast-o nīyyat-e jazm ke baqīyyat-e ʿomr moʿtakef neshinad-o khāmoshi gozinad
Graf: Er ist, sprach er, zum Entschlusse gekommen und hat sich fest vorgenommen, den übrigen Theil seines Daseins auf dieser Welt sich dem Dienste Gottes hinzugeben und im Stillschweigen zu lebenFootnote 118
Bellmann: “Er ist,” sprach er, “zum Entschlusse gekommen, den verbleibenden Teil seines Daseins auf dieser Welt sich dem Dienste Allahs hinzugeben und im Stillschweigen zu leben.”Footnote 119
Göpel: daß ich beabsichtigte, mein Leben der Kontemplation zu widmen und verdienstvollen Handlungen.Footnote 120
Here, Saʿdi twice makes use of saj, i.e. rhymed prose, also called poetic prose: folān ʿazm karde ast-o nīyyat-e jazm and moʿtakef neshinad-o khāmoshi gozinad. Franklin Lewis defines saj as parallel rhymed phrasing,Footnote 121 while Thackston defines it as phrases that rhyme with each other but lack the meter that would make them poetry.Footnote 122 The rhymed prose is recreated by Graf as: zum Entschluss gekommen und hat sich fest vorgenommen, and dem Dienste Gottes hinzugeben und im Stillschweigen zu leben. In both instances, Graf creates rhymes without maintaining the same rhythm as Saʿdi.Footnote 123 His university education gave him the competence to deal with Persian, and the context of his time, with poets such as Rückert and Goethe, were possibly a source of poetic inspiration for him as an informed reader of Persian.
Bellmann, in revising and modernizing Graf’s translation, has removed the rhyming and repetitive part “und hat sich fest vorgenommen.” Thereby, both the rhymed prose constructed by Graf and the lightness of Saʿdi’s style have been lost in Bellmann’s translation. Further, the Arabic loan word moʿtakef ( معتکف ), meaning devotion, translated by Graf as sich dem Dienste Gottes hinzugeben (to devote to the service of God), has been changed by Bellmann to sich dem Dienste Allahs hinzugeben (to devote to the service of Allah), substituting the German word Gott (God) with the Muslim term, Allah. Bellmann’s special habitus or individual intercultural habitus, through his academic expertise in Arabic and Islamic studies, is likely to have motivated these changes. Under the influence of his social position as a professor of Arabic and Islam, Bellmann can publish a translation without poetic values as in his social context, the insight into a foreign culture was considered of greater importance than poetic value.
Göpel’s translation has no rhythm or rhyme, nor does it have the lightness of Saʿdi’s text. By using a prosaic expression such as Kontemplation in German, Göpel demonstrates that her focus is on the content, kernel and essence (meaning-based translation). In her representation of Saʿdi’s world, Göpel follows Ali-Shah, who uses “contemplation” in his English translation.Footnote 124 Her actions as translator are thus constrained by Ali-Shah’s choices. She is loyal to the writer of her source text, Ali-Shah, but less so to Saʿdi, even though her aim is to keep “as close to Saʿdi’s text as the understanding in a European cultural area would permit.”Footnote 125 Her loyalty to Ali-Shah can be understood as they have a common fascination for Sufism.
In the second example, from chapter 2, story 27, a king lying on his deathbed proclaims that the first person entering the city gate shall be the new king. It turns out to be a beggar, who after having ruled for some time is opposed by emirs inside the country and kings outside. Saʿdi says: “At last his own troops and subjects also rebelled and deprived him of a portion of his dominions.”Footnote 126
Saʿdi: 
sepāh-o raʿiyyat be-ham bar āmadand-o barkhi ṭaraf-e belād az qabż-e taṣarrof-e u be-dar raftand.
Graf: Soldaten und Untertanen wurden aufrührerisch und ein Teil der Provinzen machte sich von seiner Herrschaft los.Footnote 127
Bellmann: Soldaten und ganze Heerscharen wurden aufrührerisch, ein Teil der Provinzen machte sich von seiner Herrschaft los.Footnote 128
Göpel: Angesichts dieser Rebellion und der territorialen Verluste.Footnote 129
Saʿdi uses the Arabic loanword raʿiyyat ( رعیت ) from the Arabic رعیّة , meaning subjects. Graf has translated it by the corresponding Untertanen, i.e. people who are placed under the king and thus have to obey him. Bellmann has changed the term to the archaic Heerscharen (troops) adding ganze (lots of). By doing so, the implicit social hierarchy in the source text is removed, in line with the GDR ideological promotion of equality among members of a society. In Göpel’s translation, Saʿdi’s text has been shortened substantially, and it uses two prosaic expressions, Rebellion and territoriale Verluste (loss of territory). She has, again, “favored the highest possible text authenticity,” by staying close to Ali-Shah’s translation and depriving the text of Sa’di’s rhythm, rhyme and fluent style. This approach is consistent with Göpel’s contribution to cultural understanding: Göpel would not sacrifice what she perceived as fidelity to content in order to improve literary qualities.
The third example is found at the end of chapter 7, in a debate between Saʿdi and an opponent about the wealthy and the poor, and generosity and greed. Saʿdi argues: Mostly empty-handed persons pollute the skirt of modesty by transgression, and those who are hungry steal bread.Footnote 130
Saʿdi: 
aghlab-e tohī-dastān dāman-e ʿeṣmat be maʿṣīyat ālāyand-o gorosnegān nān robāyand
Graf: Die meisten aber von denen, die nichts besitzen, beschmutzen den Kleidersaum der Unschuld im Kot und rauben gleich hungrigen Hunden ihr Brot.Footnote 131
Bellmann: Die meisten aber von denen, die nichts besitzen, beschmutzen den Kleidersaum der Unfehlbarkeit dadurch, daß sie sich gegen diese mächtigen Reichen auflehnen und aus Hunger den Menschen ihr Brot rauben.Footnote 132
Göpel: Es sind die Armen, die leicht in Sünde fallen, und es sind die Hungrigen, die Brot stehlen.Footnote 133
Here Graf recreates Saʿdi’s poetic values. He creates the rhymed prose beschmutzen den Kleidersaum der Unschuld im Kot (pollute the hem of innocence with dirt) and rauben gleich hungrigen Hunden ihr Brot (steal like hungry dogs, their bread), by adding “like dogs” as a characteristic of hungry people. It is likely that Graf here is using his special habitus, his special abilities as a writer/poet, but in doing so he changes the text. Indeed, the translation is not loyal to Saʿdi’s phrasing: dāman-e ʿeṣmat be maʿṣīyat ālāyand (they pollute the skirt of modesty by transgression) and gorosnegān nān robāyand (those who are hungry steal bread). This is probably one of the “mistakes” that Bellmann claimed to have corrected.Footnote 134 The most likely reason for Graf’s choice was his intention to create poetic prose by using the rhyming words Kot (dirt) and Brot (bread). Bellmann has changed Saʿdi’s text by adding sich gegen diese mächtigen Reichen auflehnen (protest against these mighty rich people). Again, this is most probably due to GDR ideology, reflecting the expectations of the readers/authorities: Bellmann needs to present the wealthy in a negative light, since they are associated with capitalism. Finally, Göpel has created a sort of rhythm and rhyme, by repeating the same initials words: Es sind die Armen, die leicht in Sünde fallen (It is the poor who easily fall into sin) and es sind die Hungrigen, die Brot stehlen (it is the hungry ones who steal bread). In this case, Ali-Shah wrote: “The power of abstinence is lost to the hungry, the hands of the poor become weak on the rein.”Footnote 135 This means that Göpel, in her intention to be a “bridge-builder between cultures,” must have consulted Graf’s translation, since “bread” is not mentioned by Ali-Shah. This suggests Göpel’s desire to reach a better understanding of Saʿdi in her preparation of a book acting as a “cultural bridge.”
Conclusion
At the beginning of this article, I posed three questions about the translators’ identity, the social and literary context in Germany at their time, and how and to what degree this context might have influenced their translations. As translations never happen in a vacuum, the personal history of the translator, the collective history of the source culture, and the collective history of the target culture are important factors which influence the translators and their translations.Footnote 136 In the present study, I have connected micro-level translation decisions to a wider social context (macro-level) and the translators’ habitus. In line with Toury,Footnote 137 I have looked back from the end of the process by examining the published translated texts of Graf, Bellmann and Göpel in light of their personal background and the socio-cultural context that may have influenced them.
In earlier studies of the German translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān, I have examined how the above translators have dealt with potentially taboo matters, imagery in Saʿdi’s advice and injunctions, and figures appearing in the Qurʿan and Bible.Footnote 138 None of these revealed obvious pro-GDR tendencies in Bellmann’s translation. Many of the translation solutions of Graf, Bellmann and Göpel were close, though the translators’ paratexts varied substantially.Footnote 139 In the present study, I analyzed Graf, Bellmann and Göpel’s different solutions in light of the socio-political circumstances the translators lived and worked under. On the micro-level we have seen that Graf places emphasis on poetic devices by recreating rhymed prose (saj) of Saʿdi’s Golestān. Graf had a poetic sensitivity and admired Rückert’s ability to recreate Persian poetry in German language. Bellmann deleted parts of the rhymed prose when he believed that the content was not in line with the Persian text. Bellmann wants to correct and improve Graf’s translation at a time when the GDR was building up its own literary culture. He prioritizes the elements that introduce the reader to a foreign culture. Göpel wants to break with the traditional “European” translations and keep closer to the (source) text, which results in prosaic choices. Seeing herself as a bridge-builder between nations, Göpel did not choose the English translation of a western translator as her source text. She trusted Ali-Shah, whom she knew personally, believing that as an Afghan he was closer to the source culture. In cases where Göpel has made difference choices to Ali-Shah, these are most probably based on Graf’s translation.
Though these three translations have been produced at different times, they were all produced during dramatic changes in German society and literature. Graf’s translation was prepared after times of unrest due to the Napoleonic wars (German: Koalititionskriege). Through extensive translation activity (Übersetzungsfabriken), world literature mainly from English and French, but also from more distant languages such as Persian, was brought to German readers, with the intention to extend the German literary canon. Bellmann revised Graf’s translation when the German Democratic Republic was establishing its own literary canon, independent of West Germany, and the translations had to go through evaluation by the authorities. Göpel’s translation was published when German society had become multi-cultural, the readers were no longer only ethnic Germans, and migrants had become authors. These events shaped the translators, as they were part of a larger socio-cultural formation of their countries.
Graf, Bellmann and Göpel did not only live at different times, their texts have different trajectories: Graf’s is a direct translation, Bellmann’s a revision, and Göpel’s an indirect translation, or translation by relay. By comparing them I have intended to show how ideas and values in the Persian text may change when traveling across (German) linguistic and cultural borders, due to the translator’s habitus in different social and literary contexts. My study has shown that for Graf the poetic value of the Golestān was important; for Bellmann it was the foreign content, which had to be adapted to serve GDR ideology; and for Göpel bringing different cultures closer to each other, as well as an interest in Sufism. Though the examples discussed are written in rhymed prose and not poetry, the same challenges may occur in translating them as in translating poetry. According to Jean Boase-Beier, the translation of lyric poetry requires greater skill than all other genres.Footnote 140 I believe that Graf was the most gifted translator of the three when it came to poetic sensitivity. The distance in time and space between Saʿdi’s composition of the Golestān to the publication of its German translations may be seen as an obstacle, making his message less accessible and possibly “hidden” to the translator. My findings show that it is not necessarily the distance between Saʿdi and his translators that led to their different solutions, but rather the translators’ different background, context and intentions.
